Greedy Goblin

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Starfire espresso

Starfire espresso is a simple mana drink. It gives 96K mana over 30 secs, just like highland spring water. The latter is a vendor item, inkeepers sell it for 1.375G (- reputation discount) for 5, so 5.5G/stack (of 20). The materials of the espresso are vendor items, cocoa beans for 10s and fresh water for 1.1G/5, so a stack of espresso takes 6.4G in materials. You also have to buy the recipe for cooking awards and spend time crafting. So only a moron would craft it right? OK, it's cheap, so someone leveling cooking may craft it until grey at slvl 465, irrelevant.

The achievement Set the oven to Cataclysmic requires to cook 5000 Cataclysm items and rewards the recipe for Broiled dragon feast. So the guild where someone crafts 5K espressos get their feasts for raid. 5K espresso is 250 stack, 1600 G in materials. While writing Monday's post, I crafted these (or more accurately 3600, because 1400 items were already cooked by various people leveling cooking in the guild). Now I have 180 stack of espressos. I could just vendor them, but instead I sent them to a banker and started auctioning them for 4G/stack.

So the business tip: if you are in a guild without feast, you can get it cheaply. You can save your valuable time by just giving 1600G to a guildy and tell him what to do.

If you are a mana user, you should check the AH. Maybe you can grab a box of espresso for pitiful prices, saving you some gold. Also, you can use this item while leveling, while the vendor drink works only on 85.

Update: several commenters claim that it does not work. Test it with 1 before you'd buy materials for 4K.

28 comments:

Maybe it because of guild reputation... on my alt (wich I didn't used since Cata) I tried to do it, and didn't get any. And after it I watched the guilds achis, and it said we have 0 achi points. On my main it says 120 (I don't have time now to test it with my main too, but I will today).

I think there is even people buying them because they like the "idea" of coffee... I managed to sell 10 of these for 20 gold (for all of them, not each) and in RP realm this could be more true...They're still quite rare, since most people wouldn't waste the chef's awards to buy them. There isn't really a "demand", but if you make some of this to level up cooking or to get the guild achievement you may want to try to sell them for more than 4 gold a stack.If you have some spare time you could also try to write something witty in trade to make people buy them.Obviously, right now you can gain more with other things, but I think it's worth knowing they can be sold for more ^^

Unrelated business. I managed to get my hands on the Vial of the Sands recipe. (Was my first Tol'Vir artifact - the Canopic Jar, which was very lucky)

Having the gold to burn, I initially decided to make one for myself, but changed my mind and sold it for 13K profit (factoring in the opportunity costs of not selling my own Truegold of course).

Interestingly, the fact that several on my server now have the recipe seems to have caused a massive surge in the demand for Truegold, and all the reasonably priced ones have been snapped up quick. This is a far higher demand than even the first few days where it was in very limited supply.

Also seems players are willing to pay large crafting fees as well, in the realm of 5-10K.

Any goblins out there who feel like being particularly ruthless? If you don't have the recipe, claim you do (use an addon that allows linking to it). Potentially you can raise the price of Truegold, which is very useful if you're an Alchemist.

We whipped our mage and got our feasts in like half an hour, every conjure = 20 cakes = 20 on the counter.

When we discovered it, the guildies' comments were "hmm how long will it take Blizzard to hotfix this?" nevertheless I bought the feast and even if Blizzard resets our achievement for "exploiting" hope I'll keep the feast in my cookbook to make for raids.

It was damn expensive to make those Goblin Barbecues, elementium ores alone makes a stack of BBQ "waste" 800-1000 gold worth of mats based on my server prices.

And Ulsaki, taking someone's gold for a fee to craft something you can't actually craft is scamming and will be treated as such by the Game Masters. You will have the gold you stole reclaimed and risk getting banned if you do it more times.

Of course, all this depends on the plaintif, but I doubt anyone would let a 5000g be sinked.

So that's actually a bad "business tip". An "arrested" goblin can't make gold.

If you read carefully, I never said to take anyone's money or to otherwise scam players, I simply said you can claim to have the recipe, causing a demand surge as players stockpile the Truegold to get it crafted.

That doesn't break any rules because you don't take anything from anyone. You simply profit from the increased prices of Truegold due to the increased demand.

Starfire Espresso was hotfixed, and I was the first person on Wowhead to confirm it as it was hotfixed right as I was doing it - went from 200 to 2223/5000 and then the remaining espressos I had queued up did not increase the counter.

Incidentally, what is not mentioned here is that Starfire Espresso actually makes you less drunk. Although there is no reason to drink, say, both South Island Iced Tea and then the Espresso, you can use the Espresso after the quests that require you to get drunk to save you from the ~10 minutes of involuntary camera and control issues.

Yeah I'm kind of annoyed with my guild. I probably personally made 3000 of those espressos and I kept getting on them to make some themselves before blizz hotfixed it (I had a suspicion that it wouldn't stay like that forever). Of course, no one did and we only got to 3500/5000. It's not a huge deal, but laziness is silly.

HiI must agree, with Ulsaki.Economics are greatly affected by the psichology of those involved in it. I can imagine that by many people doing what Ulsaki sugested, the average consumer (not the goblins offcourse) would feel tempted to buy greatly overpriced materials quickly, believing that the market is about to run out of the material at hand. But you must note, that even though, you don't actualy steel anything, such tempering of the market is illegal IRL, so I gues it would be considered immoral by the GM-s and you might be called to account for what you've done.

This was actually one of my ways of making gold. I bought stacks of Cocoa Beans from the vendor and sold them on the AH for 20-25g for the first week they were out. I also crafted a ton of espresso and sold it on the AH for 8-50g. Got the higher price earlier and got out when the AH started to get flooded. Didn't make a ton of gold doing this, but I did make a very nice profit for almost no work.